Moss-covered winter oak in Annadel State Park

Thanks: Alana and I (the two staff here who do the print magazine production and Tikkun Daily) have both been away the last ten days and it’s been wonderful to see Tikkun Daily continuing on without much attention from us. Thanks to all who posted and to interns who helped behind the scenes before the break. Special thanks to Hamza van Boom who monitored the comments to remove any abusive ones during the critical five days when neither Alana nor I could even do that. (Last week Alana was at work attending a conference, but found she had no wireless access from the conference floor where she was staffing the Tikkun table.)

Song and dance: My wife, Debi, and I took a couple of nights away in Sebastopol, an out-of-the-way bohemian town about the same distance (in driving time and property values) north of San Francisco as our pre-Tikkun home on the edge of the Catskills was from New York City. We felt totally at home there. On New Year’s Eve we went to a music evening in a big community center with several bands and a “love choir” — a good fifty or so people who meet weekly to have fun singing — mostly songs about love and peace. These were also people who just loved to dance so we, especially Debi, were in heaven and the amount of celebration and joy was lovely to see. We left well before midnight, of course.

Art: The town has a wonderful art ambience, with many professionals and amateurs exhibiting together in a big show right now which we found captivating. Now that I find myself jointly running an online art gallery here at Tikkun Daily, I am thinking more about art and allowing my critical thoughts about it to flourish and to get some of my prejudices knocked off in the process.

Moss and Lichen: Northern California at this time of year is a highly confusing place for people who are used to distinct seasons. On a long hike on Saturday we saw brilliant fall foliage, bare winter trees, and many bay and other broadleaf trees in full green leaf. The bay trees were starting to show their tiny yellow flowers, while the manzanita trees were in full flower — little white bells. We were in a forest where the trees were all covered in thick green moss on their main trunks and limbs, and then in more lichen than I would have thought possible, out to every last twig, plus drooping moss in places like beards. We were exclaiming about one such oak tree that looked particularly beautiful when we realized at the top of this bare tree the new spring leaves were already bursting out. And this was January 2! The green moss was dripping wet from the previous days of rain, and on one trunk there were hundreds of perfect, minute toadstools, none with caps wider than a millimeter. This was in Annadel State Park.

Individualism and Biophilia: My son had given me a book for Christmas called The Way We Lived: California Indian Stories, Songs and Reminiscences. I had expressed interest in it earlier in the year but was afraid it would join the goodly number of highly interesting but unread books on my shelves. But on this trip I was entranced by it. These people exemplified many of the things we need to practice today — living within nature, taking care of everyone (including all other species), developing a rich spiritual life. But I can’t say I can see us returning to their pre-scientific and pre-individualist way of doing things. Those genies — in all their glory as well as danger — are out of the bottle. We have to invent a whole new culture to replace this dysfunctional one we are in that combines the best of various worlds. It’s an exciting decade and century to be: we have to invent quickly.

I wanted to pick one quote for this blog to give an idea of how different that culture was, and there were many candidates. But here’s a nice one. The editor, Malcolm Margolin, comments on a line in an old man’s prayer where he says “In my northward arm, in my southward arm, I am advancing in weakness.” His comment:

The reference to “northward arm” and “southward arm” is typically Wintu, and its usage suggests a cultural wisdom so deep and unconscious that it was embedded in the very structure of language. In English we refer to the right arm and left arm, and we might describe a certain mountain as being to our right or left, in front or in back of us depending on which way we are facing at the moment. We use the body — the self — as the point of reference against which we describe the world. The Wintu would never do this, and indeed the Wintu language would not permit it. If a certain mountain was to the north, say, the arm nearest that mountain would be called the northward arm. If the Wintu turned around, the arm that had previously been referred to as the northward arm would now be called the southward arm. In other words, the features of the world remained the constant reference, the sense of self was what changed — a self that continually accommodated and adjusted to a world in which the individual was not the center of all creation.

So, Happy New Decade! and may we all learn some radically new things during it. I’m looking forward to that. There’s so much I haven’t worked out yet about how to respond to this bizarre, painful and beautiful world.